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Posts tagged: regulations

New HIPAA compliance requirements for healthcare IT vendors could result in $1.5 million in security violations if vendors do not sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with customers. Effective March 26, 2013, the HIPAA Omnibus Rule governing data security puts more responsibility on IT vendors, or “business associates” according to HIPAA, to secure Protected Health Information (PHI) when under a vendor’s control. Previously, covered entities, such as healthcare providers, hospitals, clinics, and insurers, were mostly responsible for complying with HIPAA privacy and security regulations. Now, vendors, including cloud storage and service providers, who maintain, store, create, receive or transmit PHI are also directly accountable for security breaches and liable for HIPAA compliance requirements. Read more »

Today, the major provisions of the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act (the CARD Act) takes effect in the United States. The ultimate goal of this law is transparency and clarity in terms and conditions. The likely result will be sweeping changes to how credit card issuers approach their marketing, advertising, and billing. What does this all mean for TransPromo? One long-standing hurdle to the implementation of TransPromo is the headache of document (and data) redesign. Credit card issuers were given a government-mandated opportunity to open up that data and begin a redesign process–however basic it may end up being. That said, multiple vendors and service providers have leapt at the opportunity. The general feeling from many of the companies these vendors are working with is that if they are going through a redesign anyway, what else can they do?

Some of this activity was already put into motion while ramping up for the Truth in Lending Act (Regulation Z), which took full effect on October 1, 2009. Similar to the CARD Act, the relevant portion of this law related to content and formatting changes that credit card billers needed to put in place.Â CreditCards.com has an interesting timeline that shows when various credit card legislation takes effect. Our expectation is that 2010 will reveal significant headway made for TransPromo in the credit card industry in the United States.

The other day I read with interest this article (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/life/2008-10/20/content_7121308.htm) about the government in Shanghai China banning billboards in some locations and establishingÂ rules about the sizesÂ of outdoor advertising in other public spaces.Â The text of the edict is only in Chinese, so I can’t read it,Â but the article above says that the rulesÂ limit the size of outdoor advertising in bus shelters to 2.5 meters wide and prohibit billboards in more than 630 locations in the city. This is big news because it is often said that the Chinese market has as many billboards as the rest of the world put together, and a large number of Chinese wide format printing equipment manufacturers have emerged to supply that market including WIT Color, Fei Yeung, GongZheng, Yaselan, RTZ, Beijing JHF, and Teckwin to name a few. Most of those domestic Chinese wide format printing equipment suppliers have made some efforts to serve the worldwide market with limited success. If other efforts to limit billboards and other printed outdoor advertising are made in China InfoTrends expects to see these globalization efforts increase dramatically. It is certainly possible that OEM arrangements would be considered as part of those initiatives.